Podcast recs

Failing out of my pledge to make a fanworks recs post every weekend this month. I just haven't been consuming fanworks lately so I don't have recs on my mind. But in the interests of continuing to make journal posts here are some podcasts I like!

Auralphonic is a monthly podcast about podfic hosted by our own dodificus, jenepod, and paraka. I don't make or listen to a lot of podfic these days but it's still fun to hear people talk about it and one time Dodie recced one of mine and also I love the way she laughs all the time, it makes me happy.

Our National Conversation About Conversations About Race is a fairly new biweekly podcast with co-hosts Baratunde Thurston (black dude), Tanner Colby (white dude), and Raquel Cepeda (Latina) and sometimes other guests having honest conversations about race and racism, often involving recent news items and debates. It is one of my favorites.

Slate podcasts including
-Slate's Political Gabfest - weekly, a little repetitive but generally very good
-Slate's Culture Gabfest - weekly, would be great except one of the three regular hosts is insufferably pretentious
-Mom and Dad Are Fighting, - biweekly parenting podcast which I LOVE despite not being a parent myself
-DoubleX Gabfest - biweekly conversation about issues affecting women, has been kind of uneven in the past but I think it's improved and I like two of the three current co-hosts a lot

Slate makes a bunch of other podcasts too that are all good quality shows. In general the format is that they have two or three regular hosts having a conversation about two or three items in the news, and sometimes someone's on vacation so they invite on another Slate staffer or journalist buddy as a sub host, and as you listen to more of them you start to feel like you're getting to know this whole Slate family and it's fun to check in with them from week to week, whether you especially care about the thing they're currently discussing or not.

And now the people who make those also run this larger network called Panoply that includes Show About Race (above) and some others like Open Accounts (about money) and Happier with Gretchen Rubin (about how to be happy) that I like less because they have less real content and seem more trying to sell you something.

A newer and smaller podcasting company that I also like is Gimlet Media, which has
-Startup, two seasons so far, each about a couple people trying to start a business, way more interesting than that sounds, and
-Reply All, a Podcast about the Internet. This one is a little uneven since each episode is about a different story but it's offbeat and often super interesting and I like the hosts. A recent episode that I recommend is What It Looks Like, which discusses depression and suicide and (in the second segment) Gamer Gate.
-Gimlet has another podcast called Mystery Show that I'm not into but some other people really love. You might want to give it a try.

And then of course there's NPR! which makes about a million great shows but my favorites are
-Pop Culture Happy Hour, which sometimes talks about the same new movies and shows as Slates Culture Gabfest but gosh with so much more love and good humor, I really love this show and its hosts a lot, and
-This American Life, which is so well known I feel a little silly mentioning it, and which I sometimes think is the greatest radio show ever but then sometimes, especially when they decide to tell lighter stories, I don't really find it that interesting. A recent two-parter that I recommend liek whoa is The Problem We All Live With and The Problem We All Live With Part Two, both about current-day racial segregation in US public schools and attempts to combat it.